The Kite Runner

And The Mountains Echoed
By Khaled Hosseini

In some ways, Hosseini’s new novel reads more like a collection of linked stories. The book opens in 1952, its lens trained on Abdullah, a 10-year-old Afghan boy, and his three-year-old sister, Pari, to whom Abdullah is wholly devoted and whose birth was the occasion of their mother’s death. But the perspective quickly shifts to their stepmother, and each section thereafter focuses on a different person, living in a different time period. There is an allure to this structure, as when a character is introduced whose connection to Abdullah and Pari is mysterious—the 12-year-old son of a rich warlord, for example, whose story is set in 2009—but ultimately it leaves the reader waiting to learn the siblings’ fate, after they are wrenched apart at the end of the second chapter.

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